We stood over you with the dropper of oxycodone, trying to get it in the tiny pocket inside your cheek, the three of us, like The Witches of Eastwick, but a lot less funny. Your jaw was clenched tight like a clam because you were about to die, only we didn’t know it then, and all I wanted to do was make sure you didn’t hurt. So I said fuck it and did the unthinkable, the thing you made us pinky-swear we would never do, the thing you said “under no circumstances” are you to do: I took your jaw in my hand and I pried your mouth open like you were a dog refusing to spit something out and Shari yelled don’t and Lynn yelled what are you doing and, with my thumb and forefinger, I yanked out the whole top row of your dentures and I squirted the medicine in.
I knew you hated pain. You numbed yourself your entire life to get ahead of it. Until age numbed you. First it was pills dispensed by your mother, because her brother was a doctor and they helped you sleep or, rather, they helped those around you cope with your “nerves.” Four children by the age of 25, circa 1959. Divorced by 30. Anyone with your life would want to be numb, too. Then it was booze and pills, just for the effect, which was oblivion. You were tiny so it didn’t take much. You built up a tolerance for it over the years, so when we tried to medicate you for lung cancer, it was like trying to medicate a horse. A 5’4” 90 lb. horse.
You wanted to die at home and we three were not trained nurses, so we walked a fine line of not wanting you to be in pain, and still be able to form a sentence, but not actually killing you in the process. In case there was an accidental overdose, there was always the argument that you were dying anyway, so…so that.
The cigarettes would kill you, though, not us. Non-filters. Three packs a day, for fifty years. On your deathbed you made me promise to quit smoking. I did, but it took seven years after you died. I still chew Nicorette gum.
And I’ll probably die of lung cancer one day, too, because, more than anyone, I am your daughter. I would learn how to get ahead of pain the way you did. I could see it coming a mile away. When I was little, I used to say “Ow” before you even hit me. And then I found alcohol.
I moved back home from L.A. four months before your diagnosis. Two years before your death. L.A. chewed me up and spit me out, dreams crumbled, heart crushed, even my dog died. I traveled 3000 miles on the Southwest Chief for three days with his ashes in my knapsack on the floor by my feet, among the Amish and addicts, trying to make sense of it all on a long yellow pad with blue lines. From the observation car, I looked up at the black night hoping to get a glimpse of a shooting star. Sitting up and lamenting, unable to sleep, smoking packs and packs in the last compartment on the train with the other nervous souls aboard, a thick cloud of yellow tar filling the cabin, like an iron lung in reverse. I called you on the way from a pay phone at a stop in Arizona, even though I had a cell, because there was a time limit. And I loved the sound of the change and the conversation being swallowed up at the end.
I was five years sober.
I crashed in your spare TV room for a week, on the pullout couch with the bar jamming into my back, just enough time before we got on each other’s nerves. We were like that scene in E.T., you and I, between Drew Barrymore and E.T., when she first opened the closet door and E.T. saw her and screamed, and then Drew Barrymore screamed, and then they both screamed, and then Drew Barrymore slammed the door in his face.
I hopped on the ferry and got a job running a guest house in P’town. When I returned to get my things, you wrote me a card of congratulations. You could be sweet sometimes. And you always loved the card aisle at CVS. I cried on the ferry all the way back to P’town, melancholic, listening to the music of an L.A. friend through headphones, hidden under a hoody and huddled in a corner on the outside deck, the spray hitting me in the face, tasting it on my tongue, not knowing where the tears ended and the sea began, hoping it would wash me clean. My room in P’town was the size of a closet, but I was happy there.
A few weeks before you died, I moved back in with you, but this time I slept on your long pastel colored couch in your beige living room, with the cushy carpet, underneath the Southwestern prints I bought for you, one of those rare times I had money. There was a baby monitor next to my head, on the end table, in case you needed something, which meant I also had to listen to endless re-runs of Nick at Night. Shari didn’t want me to move in, and probably neither did you, but when the news of your not being able to navigate walking to the bathroom anymore coincided with my job at the guesthouse ending, I knew I had to.
It was coming on time for hospice nurses and medicine deliveries and hydrocollators, that heavy thing we boiled using tongs and put in a towel to drape over your back to ease the pain. And even though Shari lived upstairs, she worked days, and Lynn was only good late at night, so someone needed to be there in the late mornings and afternoons. Sometimes I would listen to you and Lynn talk through the monitor when I was too wound up to sleep. High on meds, you’d say things that made no sense, and Lynn would go right along with you, all the way down whatever crazy thought road you were on, whispering back to you in a soft encouraging voice, never contradicting you. I envied her for that.
The deal-breaker was that I had to go to an AA meeting every day. And believe me when I tell you, no one wants to go to an AA meeting in the town where they grew up. Nobody. Sometimes I would come back home after and you would ask how it was, what we spoke of. I didn’t mind sharing things, especially spiritual things, because I didn’t know what was going on in your glassy eyes, how deep your thoughts went. You seemed detached from your body, as if it wasn’t yours, as if the cancer wasn’t bulging from your pelvis and your thighs, as if you weren’t preparing to die.
But then this. “Where will I go?” you asked me one day. “After.”
“Your body will be gone but your spirit will live on forever,” I said, too quickly.
“How do you know?” you said.
“I just know.”
“But how?”
“I just do.”
And then your eyes widened with a thought. “But will I still be me?”
After a moment I landed this just right, “I hope not. “
We ran a tight ship, me, Shari and Lynn. Everyone marveled at what fine daughters we were for being there. Shari would appear first thing in the morning for breakfast, or on her breaks throughout the day, buzzing in and out like a militant bee.
“Breathe, Ma!”
“Head up, Ma!”
“Blow, Ma!”
You needed Kleenex with lotion and Ziplock Bags to discard them and Bounty paper towels for meals. You were fond of paper products. And Pledge. And being waited on. You even had a tiny porcelain bell you rang, when calling out became too taxing on your lungs. You lost the remote. That shade is crooked. There’s dust on the dresser. And the lists. Always lists, of what to get at the store.
One night at ten o’clock you called me, insisting I get you dressed and take you to the hairdresser. Lynn wasn’t due for an hour. I stood at the foot of your bed and argued that it was nighttime.
“See?” I pulled the curtain to show you the darkness. “It’s night, Ma. It’s late. There is no hair appointment right now.”
I was at whatever point came after exhaustion and acute sleep deprivation. I was what a visiting nurse would later call “toast” and order me to bed or the hospital, my choice, so my tone that night was angry. I made you cry. You were a stuffer, and a slammer, and a seasoned silent scorner, but never a crier. I only saw you cry one other time. On that Thursday, before your favorite nurse said goodbye for the weekend and you knew it would be the last time you saw her, as she kissed you on your forehead, I noticed one small thin tear fall from the corner of your eye and onto your pillow. It was my pillow. I gave it to you from my own bed because it was soft, full of feathers, and you were complaining that your neck was sore, that everything was sore.
You were dying over the holidays and into the New Year. You were notorious for blowing up holidays. We were that family who caused scenes in restaurants. So why should your death be any different? That Chanukah I set the table with great care for all of us, with the additional leaf to make it look beautiful, with all your best things, just the way you wanted; linens, the good china, Nana’s silver, but none of it was the way you wanted. Something was off, missing, wrong, crooked, and we had a bitter fight and I stormed out the front door with a “FORFUCKSSAKE!”
You didn’t make it through the meal. You were tired and went to your room to lie down.
Then it was Christmas, and you were hellbent on having me drive all over the North Shore of Boston for a can-opener called “The Gizmo” that you wanted to buy for Lynn. It’s a Wonderful Life was on, and a remake of The Goodbye Girl ran in a constant loop on the T.V. at the foot of your bed. Then it was New Year’s Eve. In a flourish of phantom energy, you were hungry. You even fancied a wine cooler. We ordered Chinese and ate it on double paper plates in your bed, with a roll of Bounty, and watched the ball drop in Times Square. Just the two of us. Shari and Lynn were with their husbands. I thought, “Remember this, this moment, if you are to remember any, not all the bad ones.” Then midnight drew near, and my throat caught in those last seconds of “7…6…5…4,” watching revelers hug and tiaras sparkle, everyone smiling in New York City, the night sky lit up into day, and all that promise, wondering how I could wish you a Happy New Year, knowing you were about to die.
Instead, at midnight, I said, a little too softly, “I love you, Ma.”
And you said, “Good Chinese.”
That week a cute Irish home health aide (who shall remain Annie) informed Shari and I, in hushed tones, just down the hall from you, that you would die at any time. I felt bad for thinking someone was cute at a moment like this.
“I’m afraid you girls should prepare for the end.”
“The end?” we say.
“By tomorrow,” she says.
Silence.
“What? Really? But we…we thought we had more time. Really? Are you sure?”
I’m sure you heard it. You hear everything. It was your talent.
Annie left, and Shari and I were flattened. We were not ready for this sudden news. We were working our way up to it, anyone could see that–especially someone who was trained to see that. It was as if a show we were in suddenly closed due to bad reviews. We wanted to blame ourselves. Was there something we should’ve done? Did we give you too much oxy? Did we not give you enough? Should we gather everyone for a death intervention by your bed? Tell you it’s ok to go?
Shari and I looked at each other. We made a silent pact. We decided to revolt. What did cute Irish Annie know anyway? She was probably new. They sent us a rookie. Fuck that. Didn’t she know who she was dealing with? This was your show. You weren’t going anywhere yet. And, just to show her, you lasted another nine days. The thing about death is, it has a life of its own.
During your final breaths, Shari played Josh Groban’s “You Lift Me Up” from a boombox near your head. And I can never unhear that. Before the undertaker came, I clothed your dead body. I don’t know why I said I would. Suddenly, Shari was incapable of much. You even fought me in death. You felt heavy, immovable, like one of our arguments. I stuffed you quickly, blindly, into your freshly laundered powder blue fleece pajamas and your white booties, for comfort. I’m pretty sure there was a sheet of Bounce stuck in a sleeve.
I wish I could say I took time and care in dressing you, that I gazed lovingly down upon your face and kissed your forehead, that I gently rubbed heavenly scented lotion on your skin, that I lit a candle, that I prayed, that I held the moment sacred, but there was no reverence in it, only agony.
We somehow coerced a rabbi from Revere to come to the house for a service to say Kaddish. You were cremated, which is against our religion. I pretended I knew all the words when I didn’t, and all our goy friends followed me while singing the Prayer for the Dead. I eked out a cross between Leonard Cohen and Hava Nagila. We offered the rabbi money in the form of a donation to his shul, which we would drop in the mail very soon, we promised.
I didn’t return home for two months. And by home, I mean a loaner apartment from a kind friend in P’town who said I could stay in his place for the winter, until I got back on my feet. It took two months to become unable to sleep, unable to eat, unable to cope with your death, or with life.
I telephoned a former therapist I hadn’t spoken to in years, a lesbian in LA who wore gloves on her hands inside when it was cold, even in summer, she had this thing, but she was perfect, and honest, and straightforward and always called me out on my bullshit. I told her I was at my wit’s end, that I was in so much pain, that I — and I remember this so clearly, for I said it over and over again — “I’m so traumatized, I’m so traumatized”—meaning, by what I saw, by what I had to see, by what I had to do to take care of you, at the end.
How did I know I was traumatized, while I was traumatized?
I was quasi-employable by the early spring, as a prep cook in the bowels of a local seafood restaurant, where I was allowed to chain-smoke over the roux for the clam chowder, or while weighing pounds of slimy cod for fish & chips. People left me alone, which I needed then. I stared into a pot, or at the shiny blade of the slicer, or the thin knife that just tore into the briny flesh of a clam, and I thought of that day –over and over -that day I disregarded your one wish, while Shari and Lynn begged me not to, that day I yanked your upper set of teeth from your mouth to make room for the medicine and, as I betrayed you, as close to death as you were, and I mean you were literally half-dead, a tiny moan emitted from the deepest, smallest, most helpless place inside you.
And all I wanted to ask was, did you ever cry for us?
Photo by Chau Luong on Unsplash
